Live music in SF/Oakland, and maybe elsewhere...
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"Hello, we're Wax Idols. Thanks for hanging out with us on this stupid unimportant night."

No kidding. Usually, I try to stay home and away from crowds of sheeplike revelers...my partner in crime didn't even want to go out. So I was left to my own devices, but decided there was no way I'd be able to resist a double dose of Terry Malts and Wax Idols, so nothing was going to stop me. I packed some literature to tide me over, a copy of Evan Eisenberg's The Recording Angel and am feeling generally anti-social and disengaged. Perfect.

"Happy Fucking New Year"sez Jen's shirt

After "Hotel Room", Hether addresses the audience.

"So, this record just came out, well, in October. It's called No Future. It's not a Sex Pistols reference! It's actually how time doesn't exist, and there's no such thing as now. So this whole thing everyone is celebrating right now is like not real. Just sayin'"

The group then blazes through 'Gold Sneakers' and the remainder of the main set and realize they're still lots of time left, leaving them hung out to dry, as ANY OTHER band would string whatever to drag it out. But that isn't what Wax Idols has in mind.

"How much time until midnight? 10? Twenty?! We're never going to make it!"

A guy suggests an extended version of an Iron Maiden tune.

"Somebody get me a drink, man. About to do some spoken word or something. We had this whole plan, we were going to stop right before midnight, and then countdown maybe one more song. But we played for like 20 minutes...thank you...this is weird, this is why I hate doing shows like this, no offense. We got like one song left, we're not going to make it!"

People call out for Prince covers.

"The cover was supposed to be after the New Year, you know it was like a plan."

Play Prince covers, please!

"Prince covers? Naw, dude, no no. You can't just play Prince on the fly, he deserves more respect than that. That's fucked up."

Buzzcocks covers. Pretenders!

"All right, well maybe this will go on forever in your mind, because time isn't real, so twenty minutes is like two minutes, right?"

Wax Idols then play 'All Too Human', perhaps the best live version of heard of it to date...but the song is less than three minutes long.

"Fuck it. Corey, where's Corey at from Terry Malts? Where is he? Get up here, dude! We're going to do two covers, because we play too fast. So we're just killing time up here, y'all. We're just going to wing it because we didn't plan on doing this, so whatever."

The crowd groans, and yells out some more suggestions. Everybody seems to want to yell out their ideas on how to "help" Fortune and the band get through their "crisis".

"I wish I had some jokes to tell, but I'm really firmly anti- people talking onstage, this is breaking every rule I have for myself right now."

The crowd cheers.

"How stupid is that when people...what I'm doing right now is stupid."

2012, new paradigm, someone yells out.

"How many minutes now? We down to ten, at least? Fifteen?! What?"

Wax Idols then play Christian Death's "Romeo's Distress".

"All right we made it work. Where are we at now, how many minutes is that, two? I don't like when people play longer than thirty minutes. I'm not Grateful Dead, alright?"

Phil yells out, "Hey Corey, play another one!"

"Now, quit what you're fucking doing, and then yell to have him come over here...[we have] another cover that's absolutely not like that one...totally stup...now."

A blistering version of The Undertones "Teenage Kicks" follows that gets everyone up and dancing. It's two minutes long. At this point, it's 11:51PM, still nine agonizing minutes to go. Everybody's wondering what else's going to happen, and if the band was going to make it to midnight.

"Happy fucking New Year".

Wax Idols leave the stage.

I heard Shulman brought in the New Year by spinning Weekend's entirely apropos "End Times". But I wasn't there to hear it, as at this point, I'm crossing Van Ness back to the car by the time 2011 rolls into 2012. While there was no reason to celebrate the New Year, there was certainly reason to celebrate the emergence of Hether Fortune and Wax Idols in 2011. So there.

Normally, I eschew going out for New Years Eve, since the idea of celebrating the end of another year of misery, cruelty, and destruction seems silly to me. Looks like I wasn't alone in this sentiment, but that's for the next post. But for Phil, Corey, and Nathan, I was more than happy to head out to the good old Hemlock for at that point would have been my fourth time seeing them, and it was as wonderful as the first three times, and the next five times.

The band come onto the magnificent Witchhunt by The Mob (Papa Slumber's musical selections probably deserve their own post, but I'll include what I recorded here and allow you to hear for yourselves). Phil asks for lots of reverb, so people wouldn't know what he was saying since according to him, it was all racist stuff and he didn't want people to know they were really a white power band. Hether then yells out "NO, not the racist shit again!"...so I'd have to guess this schtick, quite obviously a put-on but easily misunderstood for those unfamiliar with the group, got frequently used during their October US tour. Haha.

"Tumble Down" appears to have Nacie speeding well ahead of the rest of the group, he has to slow down for the rest of the group to catch up.

Phil, at the end of "Waiting Room":

"The world is NOT going to end next year, so shut up! Not if I have something to say about it. I'm going to put Anthrax CD's in every house in America!".

This show also features the 2nd or 3rd performance of "Live Wire", which is scheduled to appear on a forthcoming split 7" with Dead Angle. At this point it still had the initial set of lyrics, which I'm personally a bit more partial to...as I absolutely adore the "It's a game / everyone wants to play" refrain...

"I Do" is the best song anybody has ever written about anyone else, PERIOD.

Instead of the usual Negative Trend cover at this point in the set, we're treated to a surprise rendition of The Chameleons'

"Up The Down Escalator" instead. WOW! And it's a great version, too.

The group finish up with the thrash-meets-doo-wop "Fun Night", though it's not enough to sate the assembled throng, one of whom blurts out the quite memorable put-down of "MAGGOTS, you fucking Jesus and Mary Chain FAGGOTS"...

I had PM'ed Greer to tell her about our various tapings, and she informed me that there was a show later that day...so I couldn't help but to tell her "sure, I'll be there!" And a rush, push, and a BART train later, I was there.

I had never been to Adobe Books in the Mission, but what a cool place to lounge about and see a show...I even bought a book about competitive Scrabble, which I read from waiting for the groups to set up. Both Brigid from Thee Oh Sees and Byron from Pow! were in attendance, and later on, JPD himself would put in an
appearance, taking pictures with an old-school camera. For good reason, as we were
treated to a lovely version of Lying... with Greer playing it solo. Then the Dylans came on and performed the rest of the set with her. Way too soon, it was all over...

Two of the tracks (Lying and Ants) were video recorded on a fellow attendee's iPhone fitted with a fisheye lens. These are linked above.

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